Next up in Alarm Will Sound's John Adams concert, a piano arrangement by John Orfe of Short Ride in a Fast Machine. I don't think of the orchestral version as virtuosic but the piano version definitely is. This rendition also provides extra clarity but at the expense of timbral complexity. Joshua Kosman liked the performance:

There is no logical explanation for Orfe's ability to cram so many notes
into the span of 88 piano keys, or to deliver them with such fearsome zest and
panache. But there he was, banging through the music like Liszt paraphrasing
Bellini, and turning a little curtain-raiser into a full-strength hair-raiser.
It was breathtaking.

Playing now, appropriately, is Taverner and the Tallis Scholars and earlier today, the John Adams orchestration of Liszt's The Black Gondola, itself a premonition of Wagner's death. Finally, in addition to his own works, Stephen Mosko recorded a wind ensemble version of A Short Ride in a Fast Machine. Indeed.

Art Smoot has several years of data on what 10 US classical radio stations actually played. For example, the stations played works of Beethoven 15390 times, Aaron Copland 3747 times, John Adams 543 times, Schoenberg 323 times, Philip Glass 147 times, John Cage 50 times, and Steve Reich 27 times. For the specific works of Adams, no surprise about the popularity of the short pieces, although I was glad to see Shaker Loops and the Violin Concerto in the top ten:

Choosing the woodblock is not pure happenstance either. It is the lead driver that pulls me into John Adams’ Short Ride in a Fast Machine. The piece has thrust and excitement and pulls away from the concept that minimalism has to be restrictive, diminishing, or exclusionary. Short Ride is explosive and includes as much as possible in as short amount of time as possible, but in the end, it is still minimalism. And that woodblock follows you through nearly the entire piece!